


Smoke and Mirrors

by terminallybored



Series: Children of the Nemeton [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bad shit will always happen in Beacon Hills if it possibly can, Established Relationship, Horror, M/M, Marionette Motion, Moderate Creep Factor, Pack Dynamics, Pack Growing Pains, Urban Legends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 14:04:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13719240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terminallybored/pseuds/terminallybored
Summary: Everyone plays around with urban legends. Everyone has gone into the bathroom at least once, shut off the lights, and said her name three times. What the hell is Stiles supposed to do when it actually works?





	Smoke and Mirrors

Stiles isn’t going to feel bad about taking an easy win at Black Ops if Scott is just going to keep glancing at the door every fifteen seconds. They’re in a war zone. Scott needs to learn to focus or otherwise suffer the consequences of getting tea bagged.

“He’s not gonna come.”

“Dude, it’s five minutes past 8,” Stiles says, sighing. “He said he’d come.”

“Yeah, but he probably just wanted me to leave him alone or something.” Scott runs a hand through his hair, pulling at the ends until Stiles slaps his hand away.

“You promised him pizza and beer. Of course he’ll come.”

Scott manages to frown even more at that. “Does that make me a shitty Alpha? I bribed a minor with alcohol.”

Stiles gives that a beat. When Scott doesn’t burst into a ‘kidding!’ grin, he drags a hand over his face. “Well, you uh… you know, you turned him into a werewolf so I think the underage drinking is kind of a moot point now.”

“Not like… the principle of the thing.”

“No, dude. Okay? Bribing Liam with beer is definitely not the worst thing you’ve ever done.” Biting the little psycho might be, but Scott probably doesn’t need to hear that right now. He and Liam haven’t been able to have so much as a civil conversation yet, and Stiles is proud of Scott for not waiting until two days before the full moon to extend the olive branch. Never mind that Stiles had to prod him into it a bit. Point is, Liam said yes and now Scott is a little freaked out and Stiles isn’t going to destroy his confidence.

“Yeah… okay, you’re right,” Scott sighs.

“Now just chill.”

“Right. I’m completely chill.” He reaches for his beer right as the doorbell rings. Scott, in his complete chill, startles so hard that his claws pop free and puncture the can in five places.

 

* * *

 

Alcohol is involved when it happens. Alcohol and peer pressure, that deadly mix all Stiles’ middle school teachers warned him about. Maybe a little bit of pity too, because Scott is really, really trying and really, really failing.

“So… what kind of music do you guys listen to these days?”

Stiles kicks him under the coffee table, for all the good it does. Scott hasn’t pick up on the pattern yet that Stiles kicks him every time he acts like he’s decades older than Liam. “Scott stopped listening to the radio when Bieber Fever hit.”

Liam looks between them, then shrugs. “I don’t think he’s popular anymore, so you’re probably safe to listen again.”

Stiles sips his beer while Scott and Liam stare each other down. Again. He needs to ask Derek what the werewolf translation of this fuckery is, because he’s pretty sure this isn’t how it usually goes. Derek’s Betas had all integrated pretty seamlessly.

“Okay, I’ll be right back,” Stiles says, setting down his empty can to join the one already one the table. When he stands up out of the way of their staring contest, Scott scrambles to his feet like he’s been stuck with a pin.

“I’ll come too.”

“I’m… going to the bathroom, Scott,” Stiles says, trying to eyeball-gesture him to Liam. When the resident human is taking a piss is probably a great time for them to talk about werewolf stuff or something.

“You guys go to the bathroom together?” Liam asks, raising an eyebrow.

“No!” Stiles says.

“Yes,” Scott says at the same time. Stiles sighs and grabs his arm and pulls Scott along down the hall.

“Dude, you can’t be afraid to talk to your own Beta,” he whispers.

“I’m not! He’s just… he really doesn’t like me. How do I fix it?” Scott whispers, giving Stiles those puppy eyes.

“He doesn’t like you because you bit him and made him a werewolf. Just… talk to him. Like a normal person.” Stiles watches Scott nodding his head vigorously and thinks he could probably be saying anything right now and Scott would agree. “And maybe remember that you’re not 30 years older than him. Tone it down on the ‘these days’ and ‘when I was your age’ stuff.”

“Right. That’s a good idea.”

“What are you guys doing?” Liam asks, rounding the corner, following either their smells or voices.

“Nothing. Scott was just going back to the couch,” Stiles says, giving Scott a push towards Liam.

“Hey, know what we used to do at sleepovers when I was your age?” Scott ducks into the bathroom and begins rifling under the sink while Stiles wonders if he should just cut his losses and offer Liam a ride home.

“We stopped having sleepovers when we were like, 12,” he tells Liam. “Scott is just… kind of a spaz.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that.”

“Ha!” Scott emerges from the bathroom and brandishes a blue plastic flashlight at Stiles.

“We’re gonna… tell ghost stories?” Stiles asks, taking the flashlight. They have some damn good ones now, but Liam will probably talk his dad into moving if they dump all that on him.

“No!” Scott nudges him toward the bathroom. “Come on. Bloody Mary, man, like we used to.”

Stiles looks at the flashlight, then at Scott. “We’re doing shitty urban legends?”

“I Dare you,” Scott says, and Stiles can hear the capital ‘D’ in there. “I mean, unless you’re scared.” He shrugs in the exact same careless way he would shrug when they were younger to get Stiles riled up. Stiles is ashamed to say that it still works.

“Or plan B, you can go talk to Liam and just let me go to the bathroom,” he snaps, shoving the flashlight back into Scott’s hands.

“Dude, I _Dared_ you. You can’t just turn that down.”

“Just do it so he’ll shut up,” Liam groans.

Stiles sighs. If Liam can tell that Scott is just gonna savor this for the next hour, at least it confirms Scott gnawed on one of the smarter kids.

He snatches the flashlight back. “Fine.”

 

* * *

 

Stiles uses the bathroom first because he’s not going to be totally at Scott’s beck and call. Also, he really had to go. He also checks for any missed texts from Derek. And snaps the flash light on and off a few times to test the batteries.

“Stop stalling, scaredy cat,” Scott calls through the closed door. Great, Scott has completely reverted to being 10 again.

“Shut up, I had to pee!”

Stiles waits until the tank on the toilet has stopped running before he sighs and steps up to the mirror. He knows how a mind game like this works. Darkness and disorientation and the power of suggestion all played on the brain and made shadows appear. It’s a damn powerful cocktail already without throwing sound into the mix. Stiles silently asks the guy in the mirror how he became such a pushover before watching himself reach for the light switch.

**Click.**

Blackness swallows the windowless room. Stiles tightens his grip on the flashlight in one hand. The other hand is still on the light switch to keep his bearings straight. Bathroom, he reminds himself. Scott’s bathroom. He knows exactly where everything is and nothing ever pops out of the mirror.

Shit, he shouldn’t think of things popping out of the mirror. This really is like being ten again if just a dark bathroom can still wig him out.

Stiles sighs and tries to center himself. Deep breath. Ignore the cold feeling on the nape of his neck. Ignore the hard thump of his heart against his chest. Ignore it as it gets faster. Harder. Ign-

**BAM.**

Stiles jerks his hand away from the light switch as the door rattles in its frame.

“Don’t forget to spin around!” Scott calls.

“I know how it goes!” Stiles snaps. The irritation cools some of the dread. He feels in front of him in the darkness. Cool glass slides under his fingertips and Stiles pulls his hand back quickly. Not there. Down, down… the cold metal of the faucet, the slight crust on the lip of the sink (god, rinse the toothpaste off all the way, Scott), then the solid edge of the counter. Stiles sets his hand on it and steps back. Proper clearance.

“Bloody Mary,” he says, turning around once. No cheating like he used to when he and Scott were kids. Scott will hear if he skips a word or a turn.

“Bloody Mary.” He turns a second time. His balance tilts a little. Shadows move in the corner of his eyes. Lies. It’s too dark. There are no shadows. It’s nothing.

“Bloody Mary.” Stiles turns around a third time. In the pitch black, it feels like the room tips, trying to dump him off his feet. He grips the edge of the counter tightly as he stops himself, points his flashlight at the mirror and snaps it on.

Something hits him. Deep lines of heat rip into his cheek. It’s hard, so hard that his head snaps to the side. Something spatters, and the flashlight clatters against the tiles too loudly.

The bulb sputters.

“Stiles??”

The bathroom door is wrenched open and light from the hallway pours in as Scott and Liam almost fall over each other to get inside. It takes Stiles raising his head to look at them for the heat on his face to turn into pain.

“Jesus, Stiles, you’re bleeding!” Scott stammers, yanking him out of the bathroom. The slight breeze of the air conditioner in the hallway hits his torn face and Stiles hisses at the raw sting of it.

“Is it… is it bad?” It must be, if just air hurts it, but Stiles doesn’t know what else to ask. His brain doesn’t want to work yet, to piece all of that together.

“Shit, don’t bleed on the floor!” Scott pulls him out of the hallway and shoves him back towards the bathroom. “My mom will kill me!”

“Dude, something in there tried to rip his face off!” Liam grabs Stiles’ other arm and yanks him away from the threshold of the bathroom (which Stiles appreciates, but ow).

“Fine, sorry. Okay. Sorry.” Scott looks between Stiles, then the side of his face. Then the bathroom. Stiles again. “Okay. Uh… just… hold your shirt under your cheek and get into the kitchen.”

Stiles fumbles with his phone as he gets herded into the kitchen and shoved into a chair. He turns on the selfie photo setting and holds it up, ignoring Scott’s noise of protest. He needs to see what the hell happened. Four scratches run across his face. Deep ones, gouged into the muscle. One scratch bleeds down into another and that one bleeds into the one below it and his entire cheek is slick and red with blood. It doesn’t really hurt, though. It hurts, but… not as much as it should. It will hurt when he touches it and tries to stem the blood, but right now, with nothing pressing on the torn skin, it’s just warm and wet.

“I’ll heal it,” Scott says, holding up his hands and looking frantically for a place to touch on Stiles’ face that isn’t bleeding. He settles for just grabbing a fistful of his hair, and Stiles can feel the slight prick of claws against his scalp. “What happened, man?”

“I was hoping you guys could tell me. Didn’t you… hear anything? Smell anything?” Stiles glances from the black lines flowing up Scott’s arm to Scott’s face, then Liam’s. They both shake their head.

“We heard you moving around, saying ‘Bloody Mary,’ and then the flashlight hit the ground,” Liam says, looking fairly terrified. “What scratched you?”

“Yeah, what the hell was in there?” Scott asks.

Stiles looks at both of them like they’re crazy. “Well… unless you have something else living in your bathroom, I’m gonna assume it was Bloody Mary.”

Scott has the utter nerve to roll his eyes, while he’s sucking pain and injury out of Stiles’ face through his head with his werewolf super powers. While his werewolf Beta watches. “Bloody Mary isn’t real.”

“Says the werewolf,” Stiles says dryly. “Look, I realize how stupid it sounds while I’m saying it, but I’m sticking by it. If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”

Scott and Liam debate the possibilities of another werewolf (why it was in Scott’s bathroom and had no scent is inconclusive), a kanima (lack of paralytic poison requires further study), a bat (because Liam doesn’t know which supernatural creatures are real yet), and that Stiles did it himself to scare them (lack of sharp fingernails not yet resolved). They search the bathroom thoroughly, sniffing every corner, knocking all corners of the mirror, even checking the toilet. It comes up empty, of course. Of course it does. Of course there’s not a ghost hanging around in the bathroom with blood under her nails to prove Stiles isn’t crazy. There is blood on the back of the door, though, spattered from the force of the hit. So they do, in the end, take ‘Stiles’ desperate cry for attention’ off their list.

Stiles listens to them bickering from his spot on the couch and pulls out his phone.

 

[Scott and Liam are getting along better. You should come pick me up. -SS]

 

* * *

 

Derek doesn’t ask why Stiles didn’t get in the Jeep that was sitting in Scott’s driveway and drive over to his loft. He doesn’t ask why the ‘pack bonding night’ only lasted a few hours. When Stiles first told him about it, he hadn’t asked why it didn’t include the whole pack. Derek never asks a lot of questions, and Stiles likes that a lot.

He raids Derek’s fridge even though he swore he wasn’t hungry every time they passed a fast food joint and Derek offered to pull off for the drive-thru. He shoves himself right up against Derek’s side and eats two packs of Pop-Tarts in bed while Derek reads and puts his arm around Stiles obligingly and doesn’t even complain about crumbs in the sheets. Which tells Stiles he probably really looks like crap even with the scratches healed, but he’ll take it.

“Rough night, huh?” Derek asks much later, after Stiles has made some attempt to brush crumbs off of the bed and plugged his phone in to a wall socket on what he kind of thinks of as ‘his’ side of the bed these days.

“Yeah,” he says. Not for the reasons Derek is thinking, but that’s the truth. He drops his head back down against the pillow and closes his eyes. “Pretty rough.”

 

* * *

 

It’s somewhere past 4 in the morning. Stiles only glanced at the clock before he clawed his way out from under his heavy werewolf blanket to answer the call of nature. The yellow bulb in Derek’s bathroom always casts strange shadows on the bricks, and Stiles has gotten good at not jumping at them anymore. Plus he’s not trying to be awake and alert here. The part of his brain that’s online is devoted solely to making sure he hits the bowl.

Stiles shuts off the tap from washing his hands, beginning to form some vague plan on how he’s going to get back under that werewolf blanket. As the water gurgles down the drain, he reaches for the hand towel and catches his own movement in the mirror.

And the bathroom behind him.

And the person standing in the shower.

Stiles whips around, towel clutched in one hand as if it’s some kind of weapon, and faces off against… the room. An empty bathroom. An empty shower. He turns around slowly and looks at the bathroom in the mirror again. There’s something in the shower, some dark figure that’s clouded and blurry behind the frosted glass. Something is there, occupying the space.

Stiles turns around once more to make sure. He’s not surprised that the shower behind him is empty. He looks back in the mirror. He’s not surprised that the shower there is _not_ empty.

He’s just surprised that he let himself think he got away with it for so long.

He doesn’t check the shower. Stiles just stops at the threshold and looks at the light switch for a few seconds. Then he closes the door and ignores the crack of light coming from underneath as he pads back to bed, trying to ignore his pounding heart. 

 

* * *

 

“So how was the pack bonding night?” It’s the first direct question Derek has asked about the night before. Stiles is just relieved he doesn’t ask about the bathroom light. He looks down at the cup of coffee in front of him, breathing in the steam and caffeine as he considers the question.

“It was… interesting, I guess,” he says. “I don’t know how much bonding there was. Liam is a good kid, but he and Scott aren’t gonna be best friends right away.”

Derek puts bread in the toaster and asks questions about Liam. Stiles answers what he can, and he can tell from the disapproving sounds Derek makes here and there that the knowledge gaps are appalling. Stiles doesn’t doubt that Derek knew way more about his Betas before he ever turned then, but then he also very much meant to turn them. Scott is… learning. He just needs to learn a little faster now that he’s dragged Liam into this mess.

Stiles doesn’t tell Derek about the mirror. He thought about it when he got back to bed. One doesn’t exactly slip peacefully off to sleep after something like that, so he had a lot of time to think and… it’s a stupid idea not to. There’s no denying that. But there’s a chance he could fix it, and maybe completely bypass telling Derek that he didn’t manage to learn his goddamn lesson yet. He didn’t even have a good excuse this time. Two beers was not an excuse.

Stiles faces down the bathroom after breakfast. He’s not going to tell Derek what’s going on, but he’s still going to experiment when Derek is around to save his ass if things go sideways. That probably makes him a bad person but… Stiles doesn’t know how to properly finish that thought, so he leaves it in limbo and tries not to consider the implications of it.

The bathroom door is open and the light is off. The air that wafts out is damp. Derek was able to shower without incident, it would seem, and Stiles doesn’t have texts from Scott about anything in his mirror so maybe…

Stiles squashes down the hope that it was all just a nightmare and reaches inside the bathroom, snapping the light on. The loft, with its massive windows and lack of most walls, is full of morning sunlight. It streams in everywhere, it’s even bright enough to light up some of the shadows in the bathroom. Stiles gathers that safe feeling, pads it around himself, and steps into the bathroom. The mirror is a massive antique thing that sits on the sink and leans against the wall. Stiles steps around the sink before he talks himself out of it.

Derek left the shower door open. She’s standing there. Awake and alert now, Stiles is sure it’s a she, even though she’s just a thin, dark form, a stark shadow against the sunny bathroom. She’s watching him. Stiles can’t see her eyes, he can’t even tell if she has eyes, proper eyes. But whatever she has, they’re open and Stiles can feel them boring into him. She doesn’t scratch him again. She doesn’t move.

She just just stands there. Stands there and invades Stiles’ world as one more problem he’s going to have to fix somehow.

“Stiles!” Something moves in his periphery and Stiles cries out and flails wildly. It’s only Derek’s hand catching him above the elbow and pulling him back on balance that stops him from tripping over the toilet and probably braining himself on the brick wall. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing!” Stiles grasps Derek’s arm and immediately steps out of the bathroom before Derek decides to step in. This puts him about three inches away from Derek’s body since he’s not inclined to move, but there are worse places to be.

“Then why do you smell terrified?”

Oh. So maybe being super close is a bad idea. “You… startled me is all,” Stiles says, and he’s pretty sure his heart does a lousy job of covering that lie. Derek stares at him hard for another few seconds before he looks into the bathroom over his shoulder.

“Did you see another spider in there?”

“Excuse you!” Stiles huffs, indignant. “That was one time and it was huge!”

“It wasn’t huge.” Derek finally backs off and leaves Stiles at the bathroom door with room to breathe. “Get dressed, I’ll take you back to get your Jeep.”

 

* * *

 

“I wanna come.” It’s a statement, not a request, and it comes with Liam hanging onto the window frame of the Jeep as students pour out into the school parking lot around him.

“Cool. You’re not going to.” Stiles reaches over and lifts the lock on the door. “Now get in so I can take you home.”

Liam climbs into the Jeep and shoves his backpack in the footwell before looking at Stiles, way too serious. “I’m coming with you. If you take me home, I’ll just sit in the car. And if you try to drag me out, I’ll dig my claws in. Like, everywhere. Total re-do on the upholstery.”

Stiles squints at him and makes a mental note to tell Scott not to work anymore afternoon shifts when Liam needs a lift from school. This kid is good at threats and bad at subtlety. “Tear up my car and I’ll tell Scott.”

“I’m not afraid of Scott,” Liam says, bristling. Which, fair. Scott, red eyes or no, is about the least threatening thing ever. He’s an Alpha puppy. Great, so who’s going to get the bratty Beta under control?

Stiles is pulled back to the moment by Liam’s tapping at his rearview mirror, which is wrapped in a black garbage bag that’s tied around the back. “Is she in here?” he asks. After a second, Stiles nods. It’s not like Scott isn’t telling Liam everything anyway.

“Yeah. Yeah, she’s still in there. And she’s moving closer, I think.”

Liam stares at him, blue eyes wide. “She’s moving? What happens if she gets close to you?”

Stiles shrugs. “That’s what Scott and I are gonna ask Deaton.” At Scott’s insistence. Stiles isn’t crazy about the idea, but he doesn’t have another one, and it does seem like time may be of the essence when the thing in the mirror is creeping up on him.

“I’m coming.”

It… doesn’t hurt anything, Stiles supposes. And maybe that Liam wants to go somewhere where Scott is going to be is a good sign. He’ll have to ask Derek, once this is fixed and he can stop avoiding him. Which is getting harder because it’s been two days and their hookups have gotten way more regular than that. He’s running out of emergency things that will keep him busy all night.

“Fine. Just… don’t talk too much. And don’t say too much to Deaton.” Stiles puts the Jeep in reverse, waits for the students with no concept of self preservation to move, then pulls out of the parking lot of Beacon Hills High.

“Deaton is an Emissary, right?” Liam pulls his phone out of his backpack and begins texting on it. “Scott said he helps you guys out a lot.”

“Yeah, he helps sometimes,” Stiles says. It’s true. Deaton is damn helpful. That’s as much of an endorsement as Stiles is going to make. “He’s a useful guy to know.”

 

* * *

 

Scott opens the door into the back alley when Stiles knocks. He looks at Liam. “What are you doing here?” he asks, looking like he’s debating whether he’s pleased or annoyed.

Liam shrugs. “I wanted to make sure Stiles is okay.”

“And he threatened to destroy my car if I tried to take him home, so… y’know. Good job on having your Beta in line.” Stiles doesn’t pay any attention to the face Liam makes at him. Stiles is 100% within his rights to tattle when Roscoe has been threatened.

“Liam, don’t do anything to Stiles’ car,” Scott says, using what Stiles thinks is supposed to be a firm tone. Then he and Liam just stare each other down again. Stiles sighs and squeezes past Scott to get inside while they do whatever pecking order thing they’re doing. He stops short of the exam room, looking at the long, metal table inside. Metal and reflective. Stiles settles for sitting on a large wholesale bag of kibble in the storage room and scrolling through his phone. He’s tempted to text Derek, let him know he did something dumb and now he’s possibly doing something dumber, because Derek always takes news like that in stride. It would be nice to have someone… not on his side as a reflex, but… he and Derek just think alike and end up on the same side anyway. Stiles has come this far, though, on the hope that he might get away without having to drag Derek into this one too.

“Stiles, let’s go,” Scott calls from the exam room. Stiles stands and shoves his phone into his pocket, looking into the room warily. Deaton and Scott are standing beside the exam table. Liam has been relegated to watching from the corner.

“You’re gonna wanna stand that up,” Stiles says, already resigned to the fact that Deaton will probably need a good, clear view of what he’s dealing with. “It’s hard to tell where she is in an upwards reflection.” Looking at her already made Stiles feel disoriented, like staring over the edge of somewhere high off the ground. It was worse when there was some angle that kept him from being able to pinpoint her.

Scott nods and hefts the table up, easily tipping it off the legs and resting the short side on the ground, creating an impromptu full-length mirror. Stiles feels his heart start to pound a little. Deaton mumbles something to Scott about getting a better distance reading with more space. Metal screeches against cement as Scott drags the table backwards, making Stiles and Liam both flinch.

Get ahold of yourself, Stilinski. It’s fine. It’s just a reflection. She can’t hurt you. Or at least she hasn’t. Again. Yet.

“Okay, ready.” Scott looks at Stiles expectantly. Stiles nods and steps into the room, circling the perimeter and watching his warped reflection in the side of the table. There’s a long, dark smear behind him that looks like it could be a defect in the metal. It’s not. It’s her. Stiles steels himself at the edge of the table and steps around the front of it.

She’s standing there.

She’s watching him.

Stiles has been dodging around bathroom mirrors for the past few days. Waist-height mirrors with imperfect depth perception. The table, not being a proper mirror, isn’t an exact reflection. It’s the first full reflection Stiles has seen, though. The table distorts them, makes it look like both bodies in the reflection are leaning at odd angles. She’s wearing a dress, maybe, or something that seems to turn to tatters just above the ankles. She stands solidly on the same floor as Stiles. She doesn’t float or turn translucent. She has feet and they stand like they’re bearing weight and she looks… so solid. So real. 

Her arms hang limply at her sides. They’re long arms. Too long, maybe? Maybe it’s a trick of the angle the table puts them at. Still, though, it looks like she could reach out and almost…

“Jesus,” Scott breathes, staring into the mirror. He still glances over Stiles’ shoulder even though he has to know she won’t be there. Stiles has told him that she’s not there. That she’s just a reflection. His head hurts when he watches the Scott reflection feel around behind him, his arms never grabbing at the right spot.

“Scott, stop messing with her,” he says, a little more sharply than he means to.

“Stiles is right, Scott. We don’t know what it’s capable of.” Deaton stays behind them and considers the figure in the mirror. “Best to be prudent. I’m not sure she’s violent, though. She doesn’t seem to be interacting at all.”

“Except that she’s been creeping up on me for days. And-” Stiles flinches and crouches down as the light above him flickers and dims. It casts a greenish tint around the room as it sputters and fights to stay on. “And this happens a lot around mirrors,” he says from under his arms. He’s had two bulbs shatter on him already. He’s not keen on this longer, more-glass-having light being the third. The light steadies itself and begins its fluorescent hum again.

“I think you’re okay, dude,” Scott says, squinting up at the light.

“I’m gonna… go wait in the back.” No one tries to stop him when he hurries out of the room, so Stiles assumes Deaton saw what he needed to see.

Liam follows him, jamming himself right against Stiles’ side as they sit on the pile of dog food. The two of them listen to Deaton and Scott brainstorming in the exam room.

“So, like… some kind of vengeful spirit? Does that mean she was human?” Scott asks. “She looks… real. Like she’s still a human and just… standing in the shadows or something.”

Deaton makes his thoughtful humming noise. “She’s an apparition, most likely. Most legends around Bloody Mary root her as a historical figure who has long since died.”

“Then is she a… ghost?” Scott asks carefully, and Stiles wants to laugh except he also doesn’t. All the werewolves and lizard beasts and horrible people who were just human, and they’ve never actually dealt with whether or not ghosts are real.

“I’ll need some time to look into ways to remove her from the living plane,” Deaton says. It doesn’t escape Stiles that he doesn’t answer the question.

Scott pokes his head into the storage room. “Okay, we’re gonna figure out how to get rid of her, but you should avoid mirrors.”

“I’ll do my best,” Stiles sighs. He was doing that as much as he could already, but dammit a lot of shit in this world was reflective. “Just hurry.”

Liam suddenly leans in and sniffs him, making Stiles crane away. “How are you showering?” he asks.

“One, rude.” Stiles nudges him away. “Two, I’ve figured out a way.”

 

* * *

 

The hot guy at the front desk is deeply engaged in talking to an equally hot guy about the merits of protein powder and controlled muscle tearing. They pay 0 attention when Stiles hands over the plastic tag on his keychain. The computer beeps and reads ‘D. Hale- guest,’ and the guy shoves the sign-in clipboard at him without ever missing a beat of his conversation. Stiles signs in (P. Parker) and hurries into the gym before he has to hear the exact contents of a ‘Marathon Mash’ shake. Afternoon sunlight pours in from the windows, bathing all of the really fit people on the cardio machines around the perimeter in a heavenly glow. Stiles appreciates well-lit, open areas a lot these days.

He hurries along the back wall, avoiding the mirrors in the weight area for guys to watch their posture, and the ones along one wall where there’s a lot of exercise mats laid out. This is not ideal. There are a lot of fucking mirrors in a gym. The thing is, though, there are none in or across from the shower. Since his shower at home is one glass door away from a really big mirror, same as pretty much everyone else’s bathroom, well… this is the best he’s got for now.

Stiles claims one of the corner showers and steps under the spray, sighing out slowly. The hot water eases the tension in the back of his neck a little, and he can let go of some of that dread feeling that’s getting attached to bathrooms. It’s peaceful here, which is not something Stiles ever expected to associate with communal showers. The other people help, though. Other people, bright lights overhead, not a goddamn mirror in sight… it’s the safest shower in all of Beacon Hills right now.

“Peter, I presume.”

Stiles startles at the voice behind him. He didn’t even notice the feeling of a body right behind him, and that’s a feeling he’s gotten really used to lately, so what the hell brain? He barely turns around before he’s got a whole lot of wet werewolf leaning right into his space.

“Derek, I… hi!” Stiles is irrationally happy to see Derek even if it does mean he’s going to have to come up with some sort of lie and make it not sound like a lie. God he’s missed that scowl. “Uh… fancy seeing you here.”

“Stiles.”

“Was it arm day?” Stiles gives Derek’s bicep a squeeze because he hasn’t had his hands on him in days and he just has to. His eyes trail down, chest, abs, all wet and warm and-

“Stiles.”

Stiles groans. “What?”

“Eyes up.”

Stiles scowls up at Derek. “You can’t stand a foot away from me, wet and naked, and say I can’t look. That’s not fair. Do you know how long it’s been since I saw you naked?”

“Exactly as long since I saw you naked.” There’s not an ounce of pity in Derek’s voice. Damn. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Well, I’m showering, and you’re showering, and the people around us are sho-”

“Tell me why there’s a rumor that some pale guy shows up every other day and doesn’t work out. He just sprints naked past the sinks to get to the showers.”

“Oh. People here are… weirdly observant.”

Derek raises an eyebrow. “It’s a hard thing to forget, I’m sure. And you keep signing in under superhero names, so you’re also trying to cover your tracks. Stiles!” Derek catches his chin, which has dipped slowly back towards Stiles’ chest, and forces it back up. “My eyes are up here.”

“I know, but I’m not trying to look at your eyes,” Stiles groans. “Although they’re lovely.”

Derek stares at him for a long second, then lets him go. “I don’t get it. You’ve been avoiding me for days, but now you can’t keep your eyes off my dick. I… what did I do wrong? Are you done being mad at me for it now?”

Stiles blinks at him. “What? Mad at you? I’m not mad at you! I’m…” Stiles sighs. Derek is giving him that doubtful look, and Stiles feels kind of like the biggest asshole ever. Goddammit. “I’m sorry. You’re right, I was avoiding you. But it’s not anything you did. It was me.” Stiles sighs, rubbing absently at his chest to soothe the dull ache there. “I did something… really stupid.”

 

* * *

 

Derek doesn’t ask why Stiles insists on taking the Jeep and won’t go near the Camaro. He doesn’t ask about the garbage bags covering the mirrors (though that might be why he doesn’t ask why they’re not using his non-modified car). He just listens while Stiles lays out the whole ugly story, which fits fairly neatly into the span of the drive from the gym to Derek’s loft. It feels like it should take so much longer than that. For as exhausted as Stiles is by the whole ordeal, though, it kind of all comes down to ‘played Bloody Mary, like an idiot, and I think I’m losing.’

The freight elevator in Derek’s building is slabs of concrete on 3 sides, and a metal grate that needs a little English applied to get it to close securely. The walls are brick. The floors are cement, and not the fancy polished kind. Industrial, warehouse cement. There’s not a reflective surface in sight, and the sheer relief has Stiles sagging against one of the elevator walls as it begin the climb to the loft. Derek doesn’t tell him that he’s an idiot for avoiding the least chrome-plated place in Beacon Hills, and that’s nice of him.

“You shouldn’t do rituals in this town,” he says, breaking the silence as they near the top floor.

“It’s not a ritual.” Stiles bristles and stands up straight again. “It’s a stupid urban legend. I’m smart enough not to go around lighting candles and invoking shit.”

Derek glances over his shoulder at him and raises his eyebrows. “If you perform set actions in a set order to achieve a predetermined result, it’s a ritual.”

Stiles… doesn’t have an answer for that, and if he felt dumb before, well… “It never worked before. I mean… every kid in the country plays that stupid game.”

“Ritual.”

“Ritual game,” Stiles snaps. “Even if it is a ritual, everyone tries that at some point and there’s not a pandemic of stupid kids getting ripped apart in their bathrooms! I should have been dead when I was ten if this shit really happened.”

“You’re right,” Derek says, pulling the grate open when the elevator grinds to a full stop at the top floor. “But a lot of stuff has changed since you were ten.”

Stiles sighs and follows Derek down the hallway and into the loft. He’s got a half-formed idea about turning and crowding Derek against the door, which is their favorite way to end fights anyway. And this one is more like… a squabble anyway. Good thing, because Stiles hasn’t been getting a ton of sleep and his ability to do any hardcore werewolf pinning is probably limited. He’s barely started to face Derek, though, when he gets a solid push to the shoulder, forcing him forward again.

“Kitchen.”

Stiles has already stumbled two steps toward it, and shoots Derek a glare over his shoulder. “Bossy. What do you want? Don’t say a protein shake.”

“Stay in there.”

Stiles does, mostly because he feels like that ‘don’t ask a million questions’ thing should work both ways. And he’s totally staying the night, so he might as well figure out what they’re eating for dinner. And breakfast. They have a lot of catching up to do.

Something scrapes against the wall in the living room, and whatever it is also gets a grunt of effort out of Derek. Stiles frowns and immediately pokes his head out.

“Hey, wh-”

“Back in the kitchen,” Derek growls from where he’s muscling the huge antique mirror from his bathroom towards the door. Stiles flinches away from the mirror (werewolf growlings really aren’t scary anymore) and ducks back into the kitchen. Heavy footsteps weighed down by the massive mirror stomp off down the hallway. He waits until he hears the clatter of the elevator grate being pulled shut before he emerges from the kitchen and makes a beeline straight for the bathroom.

The brick wall in the bathroom stands high and daunting and completely bare. The mirror hadn’t been there long enough for the sun to have caused any discoloration on the bricks to show anything had ever been there at all. It feels weird and a little wrong to be standing in a bathroom with no mirror (integral to bathrooms), but… holy shit, he has a bathroom with no mirror now.

 

 

That night, Stiles uses up all of Derek’s hot water, scrubbing down to the roots of his hair and the cuticles of his nails. He fills the bathroom with steam and the smell of Derek’s soap, and lets the tension in his shoulders go. He drops his forehead against the slippery tiles as the water drones in his ears, washing the stress down the drain with the other grime.

“How long does it take for your hot water to replenish?” Stiles asks when he finally emerges, wrapped in a towel and tinted pink from the shower.

Derek makes a vague hum without looking up from his book. “Probably an hour or so? Never tested it.”

“Great!” Stiles grins and drops his towel. “Lets see how dirty we can get in an hour and I’ll test that for you.”

Derek puts the book away immediately.

 

* * *

 

Maybe the sudden abundance of sleep and monster-free showers (read: the regular amount of each that normal people always get) has made Stiles too picky. He really wants to be a team player and not argue with Scott in front of Liam, but this all seems like a really bad idea. At least this time he’s got Derek on his side.

“Okay, so I’m not disagreeing,” Stiles says carefully as he watches Deaton turning slow circle in the staff bathroom in the back of the animal clinic. A steady stream of dark powder falls from his hand into a neat, even circle on the floor that Stiles is slightly jealous of. He made circles too. Maybe not that precise, but his was totally bigger. “I’m just saying that she doesn’t seem to display normal ghost behavior, you know? No wailing, no knocking my shit off shelves. So I’m not sure that herbs are gonna cut it.”

Scott thrusts the bundle of sage at him anyway. “Look, she’s a ghost, okay? You just need to burn the sage and tell her that it’s time to move on.”

“Okay, let’s say for a minute that she is a ghost,” Stiles says calmly. Sensibly.

“She’s not,” Derek growls.

“Okay, but we’re saying she is right now,” Stiles repeats, a little louder to drown out whatever argument Derek and Scott are about to get into. “She’d be super powerful, right? She’s been an urban legend for decades. And some of the stories go back to the 16th century, dude. English monarchy stuff.” Stiles would know. He’s had time to do a lot of research while avoiding anything chrome or reflective. “So wouldn’t that make her a super powerful ghost? Like, more powerful than sage?”

“Sage gets rid of ghosts.” Scott says it like he used to say Santa was real.

“Sage purifies a space,” Derek says, voice edged with irritation. “That’s not the same thing.”

“It purifies a space and then ghosts can’t stay there.”

“She’s inside the mirror, Scott,” Derek shoots back. “ _All_ of the mirrors. What is the sage going to do?”

“Maybe the reflection of the sage will help?” Liam offers. He’s roundly ignored like the junior pack member he is.

Scott growls in frustration and points at the bathroom. “There’s a circle of mountain ash. Even if it doesn’t work, she can’t hurt him.”

Derek growls right back, eyes lighting up blue. Scott’s light up red in response. Stiles sighs and grips Derek’s shoulder.

“Fine. We’ll try and… purify the space to see if she goes away.” It’s not like they have a better idea, and lord knows that’s been good enough to try more than one of their bad ideas before.

“It’ll work.” Scott reaches into his pocket and hands Stiles a Zippo lighter. “Remember. Just like Deaton showed you.”

Stiles looks at the bathroom door and sighs. Aside from a few quick glimpses in the door of his Jeep, Stiles hasn’t had to see this damn thing in days. Derek must be able to hear his heartbeat picking up. He steps up behind Stiles, close enough for Stiles to feel the warmth of him at his back.

“I’ll be right behind you.” The words are quiet, except they’re in a room full of werewolves.

“Yeah, I’ll come too,” Liam offers. Derek just turns to look at him for a few silent seconds before Liam takes a step back. “I’ll wait out here.”

“It’s for the best,” Deaton says, joining the conversation as he comes out of the bathroom. “It’s not a large space in there, and we don’t fully know how she can interact with other people.”

Derek scoffs. “And yet we think sage and a firm tone are going to banish her.” Stiles kind of wants to just pull Derek into a hug because _yes_ , and this time he didn’t have to be the one to say it. When neither Scott nor Deaton find that excellent point to be a reason to call this whole thing off, Stiles breathes deep and steps inside with Derek on his heels.

Stiles tries to ignore the nasty jolt in his stomach that he gets from seeing her over his shoulder. He tries not to look at her too much, period, because of that vertigo feeling.

“Stiles.” Derek is in full Beta shift in the mirror, and Stiles can still see the shadows of Mary in his periphery. He can tell that Derek is watching the dark shape in the mirror, the thing he’s only glimpsed in snatches of car doors and computer screens with dark backgrounds. But he’s forcing himself to stay calm just as much as Stiles is forcing himself not to give into that sick feeling of panic that squirms in his stomach. “Come on.”

Stiles glances at the floor and steps inside the circle of ash that Derek had to skirt around. He grips the lip of the small sink, looking at the brown coffee stains around the drain as he gathers his nerve. “Okay.” He flips open the lighter and flicks it to life. Tries to, anyway. It sputters the first time. The second time his fingers don’t catch it right. Stiles shakes his hand out a little, and hears the faint slosh of fluid in the lighter. Just his nerves, the lighter is fine.

He gets a flame on the fourth try, and waves the edges of the sage over it, trying to get them to catch. She’s watching him. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t need to. He knows she’s watching him. He fumbles and drops the lighter, singeing his fingers slightly when he tries to catch it. It clatters beside his feet, sounding very far away.

“You’ve got smoke.” Derek’s voice drowns out his own pounding heart in his ears and makes him look at the bundle in his hand. Derek is right, there are wisps of smoke coming off the ends of the sage.

“Okay.” Stiles pulls in a shaky breath. She’s watching him. He waves the bundle of sage in the direction of the mirror. “Only… only li-” She’s watching him. The words stick in his throat and Stiles has to swallow.

“Only light and life…” Derek prompts.

Stiles nods, too rapidly. “Only light and life can dwell here. I command you to leave this place.” She’s watching him. Nothing about that shadow behind him has changed. She’s not shrinking back in horror or pain. He waves the sage again, trying to waft the smoke against the mirror. Some of it brushes at the glass, but most of it curls up toward the ceiling. “Only light and life can dwell here. I command you to leave this place.” No rays of heavenly light are breaking through to melt her away. She’s just watching him.

Stiles waves the sage harder, fingers tightening on it until the hemp twine holding it together bites into his palm. This is his only goddamn weapon and he’s going to use it. The air catches the embers and they burn brighter. The wisps of smoke get thicker and the earthen smell makes his nose burn a little. “Only light and life can dwell here! I command you to get the fuck out of here!”

“Stiles,” Derek growls as the ends of the sage glow red with live embers. “Caref-”

Mary lifts her head.

Her head jerks to one side. Then the other, like using a neck is foreign. Two pinpoints of light from under her hair catch the orange glow from the herbs that have started to burn in earnest. Stiles’ breath only gets to hitch once.

The long fluorescent light above him sputters. It blinks, rapid and furious, like it’s fighting for its life. One of the supports in the ceiling snaps like someone yanked on it, and the light swings in a wild arc, flickering and throwing long shadows that spin around the room.

“Stiles, get down!”

In the mirror, Mary… convulses. In the dizzy spasms of light, Stiles sees it. She jerks herself forward on one side, hip and shoulder jut and the rest of her form drags behind her. The other side. The light catches those pinpoints in her head again, and they flicker out as the light does.

In the dark room, there’s a very soft dragging sound.

Chunks of plaster from the ceiling rain down and blue sparks pop over Stiles’ head. Metal groans, a sound that starts low and gets higher as it rips apart. Stiles’ lizard brain finally yanks the wheel away, and he ducks down, covering his head from the destruction above him, just as the light fixture slams into the mirror. It explodes, the hit rippling outward and glass spraying out at the room. Stiles hears it tinkling against the tile floor and the sink, feels some of it bite into the backs of his hands and neck.

There’s a beat of heavy silence, punctuate by the last few bits of glass falling into the sink.

“Derek!” Scott growls.

“Break the fucking line!” Derek snarls behind him. There’s an edge of desperation there that makes Stiles force his hands to work, scraping blindly on the floor and ignoring the fresh cuts in his palms. His fingers find the powder-fine grit of the mountain ash line and smear it. Strong hands catch his upper arms and Stiles feels himself being hauled up to his feet, and then mostly off them as Derek pulls him out of the bathroom.

“What the fuck, Derek?!” Scott snaps, bracing his hands on the door frame and looking around the dark room. “You broke the mirror, what if she got out??”

“Then she got out and we’ll deal with her.” Derek’s voice sounds like a bowstring that’s been wound too tightly and Stiles tries to blink away the heavy fog on his brain as he’s deposited on the same sacks of dog food he sat on before, safe in the cement storage room.

“I… I’m okay.” He thinks he is. Well, cuts and some minor burns aside (that would explain where the sage went), he’s okay enough to tell Derek he is. That whatever he thinks happened, didn’t. Stiles didn’t get his soul sucked out or get gored or whatever else that goddamn thing might do. “Derek, I’m okay.”

“You’re an idiot,” Derek growls, gripping his chin and turning Stiles’ head so he can see his face from one side, then the other. “You picked a hell of a time to freeze.”

“I’m sorry. I… I don’t think I’m supposed to look at her. She makes it hard to… focus.”

“Here.” Liam offers Stiles a can of grape soda. There’s plastic debris on his sleeve and part of a Coke logo on a piece of it. Stiles has a nasty feeling there’s a gutted soda machine in the hall.

“Thanks, Liam.” Stiles takes it and sighs. The cold feels good in his hands. It grounds him. He’s not sure his fingers will quite work to open the tab right now, but at least while he’s gripping onto it, his hands won’t shake.

Derek pulls the can over without making Stiles let go of it and pops the tab open. “Drink.”

Stiles is two sips in and already feeling better for the rush of sugar when Scott comes back, an industrial flashlight in hand.

“I don’t think she got out. There’s nothing wrong in the bathroom except that Derek destroyed it.” Scott glares at Derek to punctuate that.

“Ghosts don’t get trapped in mirrors.” Derek pushes away the sip Stiles is offering him. “And the way she moves… she’s not something human. Or that ever was human. Can we stop poking at her and do something now?”

“Don’t fucking make this my fault,” Scott snaps. “She’s in a mirror, we haven’t been able to hurt her even if we wanted to!”

“But you don’t want to. You want to find some magical way to make disappear, nice and neat.” It’s not a question. Derek finally takes the can Stiles shoves at him again.

“Drink,” Stiles growls. “And everyone just… calm down. We really don’t need to fight each other right now.”

“She’s right at your back now. That was a fucking stupid plan.” Derek takes a perfunctory sip and then pushes the can back into Stiles’ hands. “There, I took a sip. Drink the rest.”

“There’s plenty of sugar to share.” Stiles would know. He found one of these in his dad’s waste basket once and nearly lost his breath when he read the label. His dad tried to turn it into a privacy issue, but really, that would have been fair game under the plain view doctrine, so there. “So what do we do now?”

“I don’t know. That was the best plan we had.” Scott glares at Derek, who glares right back at him. “And now we have to wait because Derek broke the mirror.”

“I had to break the mirror because your plan didn’t work,” Derek snaps. “And you closed Stiles off in a ring of mountain ash.”

“You could have let her out!”

Derek pulls in a long breath through his nose when Scott’s eyes glow red at him. Stiles can almost hear him counting in his head to stay calm. “Why are you so afraid of her getting out? At least then we can do something.”

“Because we don’t know how to handle her. It’s safer while she’s contained.”

Stiles is tempted to remind Scott that containing Mary also means he has to stay confined from… almost everywhere. If he stays quiet, he’s sure Derek will bring up the same thing. But that’s just going to prolong an argument that nobody is going to win. He fumbles for his pocket and pulls out his phone. The past few days have made him really good at turning the phone on before he faces the screen towards him, but this time he turns it over while it’s still dark.

“Stiles,” Derek growls.

Stiles looks at his reflection. The dark form is right behind him, and it makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. She jerks her neck to one side, and Stiles turns the screen away before she can look up again. If that’s even what she’s trying to do. If it’s not, Stiles doesn’t want to know what that was.

“Well, she’s still in the mirror,” he says as Derek snatches his phone away and shoves it into his jacket pocket. “So she’s still contained. But she’s also… super active right now. And I’m… really tired.”

“We’re going.” Derek gets up and hooks a hand under Stiles’ arm, pulling him to his feet. Stiles is sure from the way those fingers squeeze him that it takes all of Derek’s control not to yell some snide comment back at Scott.

 

* * *

 

Stiles is still mostly asleep. He’s been in that ‘mostly asleep and yet still awake’ state enough times in his life to know there’s probably a reason, so he struggles to get his brain back online. It’s dark. He doesn’t even need to open his eyes to know it’s still dark and some ungodly early hour. Everything around him has that strange, liminal stillness to it that only early mornings have. There’s steady breath by his ear, matching the pattern of a chest rising and falling alongside his own.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Steady heartbeat.

Rustling fabric.

Stiles forces his eyes open and blinks them in the black of the loft. Only a small amount of light makes it in from the streetlights so far below them. His face is half mashed into the side of Derek’s neck and he can make out the vague shapes of a shoulder and torso. Perfectly still, aside from the breath.

The fabric rustles again.

Behind him.

A cold, unsettled feeling starts at the back of his neck and runs down his spine. The sheets under him tug. Very slightly.

He doesn’t want to look. God he doesn’t want to look, but he’s going to. Stiles lets go of Derek and braces a hand on the mattress, fingers digging in for a fistful of sheets as he pushes himself up slowly, just enough to turn and look.

It’s an arm. Fingers grope blindly at the empty space on the bed. Stiles’ brain sputters unhelpfully. An arm. He follows the long, dark shape of it. Just past the elbow, it vanishes into the drawer of the nightstand.

The fingers dig into the mattress slightly and the sheets tug again as the fingers move closer, another half inch emerging from the drawer. The tug kicks Stiles survival instincts back online and he lurches backwards. Either the screaming wakes Derek, or Stiles slamming into him does (he can’t tell which comes first), because there’s a strong arm looking for some part of his flailing body to grab.

“Arm!” Stiles gestures wildly at the same time he’s trying to crab-walk backwards and climb over Derek or maybe just shove them both off the bed. “Arm, Derek!”

“Wha-” Derek catches Stiles around his waist and tries to grab his arm.

“No, ARM!”

Bless Derek that Stiles screaming the same word means something different by the third time. Stiles hears the snarl behind him and the slight cracking of bones as he slides into his Beta shift. He pulls Stiles over him, and one firm push sends him over the edge of the bed as Derek lunges across it.

Stiles scrambles to his feet as something cracks, and then cracks again, and he’s back on the bed just in time to see the arm slipping back over the edge of the drawer, all of the pieces at wrong angles now. Derek growls and tries to catch ahold of it again. When he growls in frustration and yanks the chain on the bedside lamp hard enough that it snaps off in his hand, Stiles knows it’s gone.

“Wh-what the fuck?” he manages, crawling back onto the bed. His legs feel like jelly. So does his stomach. All of him feels like jelly, like he’s just a quivering mass with nothing solid to hold him up.

“It’s gone.” Derek slams his fist on the nightstand.

Stiles only notices the claw marks gouged into the mattress as he’s crawling over them, the foam gaping wide and spattered in black… something. He gingerly shifts his weight forward to peer into the drawer, taking care not to set his hand right in the black goop. Inside the drawer is just his phone and that paperback he keeps meaning to read. The phone is leaning against the book, decidedly not the position Stiles left it in (face down in a drawer, specifically so he knows where the reflective side is, even half asleep). He’s got a nasty feeling that the phone was probably at just the right angle to catch his reflection.

“Derek.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t leave my phone like that.”

“I know.”

“And I closed the drawer.”

“Stiles.” Derek sets a hand on his shoulder and draws him carefully back from the drawer. “I know.”

Stiles sits on the bed, feeling numb. “Well. Now we know what happens when she catches up to me.” He reaches for Derek’s arm and examines his claws, stained in black that’s still wet. “Is this…?”

Derek nods. “It’s from her. She didn’t hurt me.”

They spend the rest of the night on the couch, catching fitful snatches of sleep until the sun comes up and it feels safe again.

 

* * *

 

“Stop checking your phone.”

“I’m not,” Stiles says as he checks his phone.

 

[Dude, call me ASAP, shit is getting real. -SS] -sent 7:12 AM.

 

“You’ll hear it when it rings.” Derek herds Stiles into the mattress store.

“Just seems like ‘ASAP’ doesn’t mean ‘wait 5 hours,’” Stiles sighs, but shoves his phone into Derek’s pocket all the same. They’ve decided it’s safer to just not let Stiles hold any reflective items on his person, period.

“Well you’ve left him two long messages. It’s a lot to digest.”

“I just thought he’d be more excited. I mean, she’s not invincible. Bleeds and breaks and everything.That’s good news, right?”

Derek shrugs. “He probably had a long night wrapping up at Deaton’s.”

Stiles lets out another sigh, this one longer and more dramatic, but doesn’t argue. He can tell that Derek is trying not to talk down on Scott, and that’s actually super nice of him and only an asshole would ruin that. Stiles will not be that asshole. 

“Fine.” Stiles wanders up to the very first mattress in the store and throws himself on it. He bounces slightly, the distinct feeling of springs against his ribs and stomach. “Springs.”

“I know,” Derek says, looking up from where he’s reading the display plate. Which, fine, maybe that’s another way to tell what kind of mattress it is. Stiles is a more interactive learner.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” It’s the sort of place where the people who work there wear regular polo shirts and you just have to trust that they actually work there. No helpful name tags or logos. But the woman looks like the sort who might sell mattresses, with her wide-leg trousers and sensible flats.

“We need a mattress,” Stiles says helpfully. She titters a little, probably because it’s her job.

“Well, you made it to a good place for that. Do you know what sort you’re looking for?”

“Firm,” Derek says.

Since he doesn’t appear inclined to add anything onto that, Stiles fills in some more of the blanks. “And foam. I played lacrosse in high school. And I’ve got these long limbs,” he says, flailing them a little for emphasis. “Means the joints are iffy sometimes. And Derek has a bad back.” Derek doesn’t look like a single part of his perfect body ever bothers him, but ‘bad back’ is the best code for ‘firm enough to get off of super easily if something is trying to kill him’ that Stiles has found. ‘Bad back’ firm and ‘decent leverage for launching’ firm are the same thing.

“Right.” She looks at Derek a little too long,sounding like she doesn’t believe a word of that.

“And sturdy,” Stiles adds, clearing his throat. “Really sturdy. Y’know. California earthquakes and all that.”

She takes them to a section of mattresses that all look exactly the same, flat and free of the puffy quilting that tops the softer mattresses. They all pretty much look like the gashed one sitting on the ground floor of Derek’s building to be hauled away. They thought about just flipping it, but… monster blood and all. Didn’t seem sanitary.

Stiles immediately flops down on one of them and almost gets the wind knocked out of him by it. “Hey Derek, you’ll like this one.”

Derek just presses the mattress appraisingly. “Sure, if you like it.”

“You’re supposed to lay on a mattress for ten minutes to decide if you like it.” Stiles rolls onto his stomach. Then his side. “That’s the right way to test it.” Stiles shifts onto his back again. Okay, maybe not a full ten minutes. He’s wired from a lot of coffee this morning to make up for not a lot of sleep. And not hearing from Scott. Oh, and the monster that’s coming for them in the night now. That too.

Stiles hauls himself up and switches to another bed. This one dips a little more. When he tries to tuck and roll off of it, it takes him two tries to get the momentum. Granted, his core is probably a little softer than Derek’s, but still. This doesn’t make the list.

“Sir.” It takes four mattresses for the sales woman to get tired of Stiles’ subtle recon moves. “I’m not-”

“This is actually pretty mild,” Derek says without looking up from his phone. “Just let him pick the one he likes.”

Stiles rolls back onto the first mattress and sits up on his knees. “Derek. Derek, check it.” He bounces slightly on the mattress. “Look how firm it is. Can you imagine the leverage we could get when we-” Stiles cuts himself off, remembering they’re in polite company. “…have pillow fights?”

The sales woman retreats to the back.

 

* * *

 

“You had way too much coffee this morning,” Derek says as he very pointedly sets a styrofoam cup of water down in front of Stiles. The straw is jammed through the small opening of a black coffee cup lid, which Stiles guesses is to protect him from any possible reflection in the water. It’s a solid idea because he is NOT ready to explain away a demon arm reaching out of his water cup in the middle of the mall’s food court.

Stiles makes a vague noise of agreement from where he’s flipping through the pamphlet they got from Suzanne, their beleaguered sales woman. “There’s a ‘how to care for’ section, Derek.” He turns it and shows him the small pictures with arrows and instructions in tiny writing. “How do you care for a mattress?”

“If our mattress needs care, that’s your job,” Derek snorts. “You picked it.”

 “God, I’m not ready for this kind of responsibility.” Stiles drops the pamphlet when Derek sets down a tray laden with all kinds of stuff Stiles won’t let his dad eat. He only gets two bites into his food court pizza when his phone rings in Derek’s pocket. Stiles grabs a handful of napkins and probably gets most of the grease off his fingers before he’s fishing around in Derek’s pants (maybe slightly inappropriate in a family setting).

Derek slides his chair a little closer to compensate for the noise of the food court as Stiles picks up the phone. “Scott! Did you get my messages? Oh my god, it was so goddamn creepy, dude. It was just a fucking arm! Just reaching out-”

“Yeah, Stiles. You left me like, eight minutes of voicemails. I got it,” Scott says.

“At least I didn’t call you at 4 in the morning.”

Scott pauses on the other end of the line. “Yeah, okay. Good point. I ran this by Deaton, though, and we think we have an idea.”

Stiles sits up, pizza forgotten, shooting a look at Derek. Derek just raises his eyebrows, poker face firmly set. “Awesome. That’s great, what are we gonna do?”

“Okay, so we think she’s like… she’s like a character in a video game. Like how the enemies in the game just do the same thing over and over, no matter what?”

“Okay… I guess so. I mean, she’s definitely got a set pattern of behavior,” Stiles says. “Little more calculated than a video game, though.”

“Right, but here’s the thing. Deaton says once she gets summoned, she probably has to finish her task. And she’s even willing to risk being outside the mirror to do it, like last night,” Scott says. His words are getting faster, which Stiles… doesn’t like. That usually means he’s got an idea he needs to sell. “But I think her task is actually to take you into the mirror with her.”

Stiles and Derek blink at each other. Derek speaks first.

“What the hell makes you think that?”

“She’s had all this time, but she’s never hurt Stiles,” Scott says, voice taking a harder edge when he talks to Derek. “I don’t think she actually can. A lot of the lore around Bloody Mary involves her pulling someone back into the mirror with her.”

“But she _can_ hurt me,” Stiles points out. “The first night, she scratched me, remember? And there’s a lot more Bloody Mary lore about her ripping people open than there is about her pulling them into a mirror.”

“See, but I think she was just like… accepting the challenge. You threw down the gauntlet, she picked it up.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that she’s definitely able to hurt him,” Derek growls. “And even if you’re right, so what? We still can’t let her drag Stiles into a goddamn mirror.”

“Obviously we’re not, Derek!” Scott snaps. “We control it. So… okay, just hear me to the end on this one.”

Stiles looks at Derek. Shit.

“Okay.”

“We let her take you into the mirror.”

“Sorry, wh-”

“Listen, listen to the end!” Scott insists. “I’ll be attached to you. Like, a chain or something, so you don’t get lost. If you can’t find your way back, I’ll come in after you. And then it’s all over. She did what she was supposed to do and she’ll be gone.”

“No,” Derek says.

“I… think you’re giving her credit for being way more benevolent than she seems,” Stiles says, feeling his stomach churning a little. He was kind of hoping for some plan that didn’t involve more extensive mirror use. “I mean… like you said, she picked up the gauntlet by proving she could hurt me.”

“Do you have a backup plan for when she tries to gore Stiles?” Derek snarls.

“If she turns violent, we’ll deal with her,” Scott growls. “This is the best idea we’ve got. Stiles, you can’t just live with Derek forever and never see another mirror.”

Well, Scott is right about the last part, at least. His dad will eventually wonder why he never comes home.

“And Deaton thinks this is best? He looked at all of this and really thinks she’s just gonna… drag me into the mirror and then go away?” Stiles ignores the glare he gets from Derek.

“Yeah. He said she has a singular goal and she’s just going to keep at it.” Stiles notices there’s nothing in there to back up the idea that her singular goal isn’t to gut him. “She doesn’t seem to have to do anything else except wait for you to come near a mirror.”

“And do we have some idea of how these… mirror physics work? How easy will it be for me to get back out?” Stiles pushes his pizza away.

“Deaton is working on that now, but he’s got some placement and location charms that will make sure we can find you if you can’t come back the way you came.”

“And-”

“That’s Deaton on my other line,” Scott says, cutting him off. “Tomorrow, okay? We’ll have her gone by the end of the night.”

“…Right. Okay, Scotty.” Stiles’ voice sounds far away in his own ears.

“Great! See you guys then.”

Stiles looks at his phone as the call disconnects. Derek slips it out of his hand as the screen starts to go dark, putting it back in his pocket.

“Scott is trying everything he can think of to make this just go away,” he says. Stiles nods.

“At least Deaton thinks it’s a good idea.” Which actually isn’t comforting at all. Stiles isn’t sure why he said it. Maybe just to have something to say while it all sinks in.

“Deaton doesn’t want to risk Scott killing something he can’t identify.” Derek doesn’t even try to hide the disdain in his voice anymore. “It’s not going to work. You already know that, don’t you?”

Stiles nods. He doesn’t have a werewolf’s instincts, but he has enough human ones to know when something behind him is dangerous. And this is something he can’t even turn around and confront.

“I know.”

 

* * *

 

Sleep doesn’t come easy. Of course it doesn’t, he’s about to be dangled inside a goddamn mirror in the vain hope that some faceless monster is going to just pat herself on the back and walk away. Perfectly reasonable that there might be some tossing and turning.

Stile grunts and turns to throw himself onto Derek in lieu of trying to retrieve the blankets down around his shins. Werewolf heat is better anyway.

It’s a nasty shock when his stomach hits the mattress, cool and empty. Stiles fumbles for a second, then opens his eyes and pushes himself up. The bed is empty. Enough moonlight pours in to tint the black night into gray and Stiles picks out the shadows he knows. The couch. The coffee table. The spiral staircase.

No noise. No light from the half-open bathroom door. No Derek.

“Derek?” Stiles climbs out of bed and checks the bathroom just in case. He shuts the door when it turns out to be empty. “Derek,” he calls, louder because there’s no neighbors to bother. He swears to himself when he realizes he doesn’t even have his phone. He had agreed that Derek should keep it hidden so he didn’t invite another arm out.

No answer. Stiles hits the lightswitch on the wall, trying to figure out how Derek got out of a rolling metal door without waking him.

**Click**

The room stays dark. Stiles looks at the switch slowly. Flips it down again, then back up.

Nothing.

Tension prickles down Stiles’ spine as he follows the wall, looking for any movement in the shadows. He grabs his bat from beside the bed, hefting up the comfortable weight in his hands. It settles in the crook of his shoulder. It does not settle the pounding in his chest.

Shoes. Keys. Stiles begins making a mental list of what he has to do, what absolutely has to happen.The loft is empty, he needs to get out of it. He needs light. A phone. He has to tell Scott, tell Deaton, tell his dad, tell ev-

Something howls from very far away. Someone.

Stiles feels his guts churn and clench when it happens again, long and painful, like the sound is being pried out by force.

Every plan that was forming is instantly replaced by one- find Derek and make the howling stop.

The wheels of the door clatter along the rail, filling the silence with an obscene amount of noise. Door open, the gaping black of the hallway stands like a void. The moonlight is swallowed up, nothing making it past the crisp line of the doorframe. Stiles grips his bat as he steps into the hallway, rolling the door shut behind him. Then he listens, strains his ears in the crushing silence left in the door’s wake.

Another howl. Under the pain and the fear and the distance in the sound, there’s… a wobble. The sound bounces around like… like… Stiles turns his head. There’s nothing but blackness, but he knows right where the elevator shaft is.

The tiny light of the elevator call button shines like a beacon in the black hallway, deep in the middle of the warehouse floor with no windows. The gears of the elevator grind to life and it sounds so slow. So goddamn slow as the ground begins to rumble gently under Stiles’ bare feet. It feels so far away. It’s so loud.

Not loud enough to drown out the sounds coming up the shaft. The howling sounds more human, like an animal and a person are screaming in unison. Stiles beats the call button under his palm for all the good it does him.

“Derek, I’m coming!” he yells down the shaft. It sounds, to his own ears, like his words are swallowed by the walls. He’ll have to hope the sound travels so easily both ways. “I’m coming! Whoever’s down there, I’m fucking coming for you too!” With a baseball bat and all the bravado of someone who’s just been scared for too long.

The elevator has barely halted when Stiles yanks the grating aside and lunges into the dark maw.

 

 

Something catches the back of his collar and Stiles feels himself reeling in midair, unable to move.

“Stiles!”

Blackness stretches out under him, measurable only by how quickly the thick, grimy rope vanishes into it. A dizzying wave hits him hard and he makes a strangled sound, windmilling his arms and trying to scramble out of his precarious tilt over nothingness. The hold on the back of his collar yanks, and Stiles feels his back hit cement.

Derek looms over him, eyes blue and glowing in the dark. His hands are pressed to the wall on either side of Stiles, boxing him in.

“…Derek.” Stiles has never heard himself sound so surprised in his own ears. He grasps his arms and can’t see enough in the dark to tell a goddamn thing, but Derek is here and he’s not making those sounds anymore. “What happened to you? Where were you?”

“Following your sleepwalking ass,” Derek growls, leaning in close enough to brush his nose against Stiles’ pulse point. His breath feels as uneven as Stiles’ pulse.

“Sleepwalking?” Stiles tilts his head to the side to expose more neck to Derek while he gets his own bearings straight. He’s still in the hallway. The loft door is standing open, the faint orange glow of lightbulbs seeping into the hallway. He looks the other way.

The elevator shaft stands black and open.

And empty.

“Did I almost…?”

“Yeah,” Derek says against his neck. “It was stupid of me. I wanted to see where you were going to go. I should never have let you get out of the loft.”

Stiles sets a hand on the back of Derek’s neck and rubs his nape. His eyes are still glued on the open shaft. “It’s down there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“She was taking me to it.”

Derek nods shortly, his hair tickling just under Stiles’ jaw. “Didn’t care if she killed you getting you there.”

 

* * *

 

They take the elevator down. There doesn’t seem to be a reason not to. It’s faster and non-reflective and Stiles doesn’t want to jump at every shadow the he thinks twitches in the corners of the many, many stairwells that stand between them and the basement.

“I’ve never been down here,” he says when Derek yanks the grating aside on the elevator.

Derek reaches out of the elevator, into the pitch black space in front of them, and feels the wall.

**Chunk.**

The sound of the switch is heavy and it echoes off of walls that sound very far away. Lights sputter to life, rows of bare bulbs in sockets along cement beams. Under the beam, Stiles can see a maze of exposed copper pipes, covering the ceiling. The room that stretches out before them is a vast, empty concrete space, punctuated by solid cement pillars that support the building above them. The pillars cast long shadows where the lightbulbs are further away.

“It’s about as creepy as any other basement,” Derek says, stepping off of the elevator and looking around. “Just bigger.”

Stiles follows him off and keeps his bat tucked against his shoulder as he follows Derek. Even in sneakers, his footsteps echo in the empty space. He finds himself turning slightly to the pillars as they pass, looking behind each one. Every single support looks like a place to hide. Feels like the thing making his pulse thrum against his neck might be standing just around any one of them.

“They’re empty,” Derek says, even though he keeps sweeping the long floor as they go. Stiles can see the deliberate rise of his chest. Sniffing too.

“I know. Can’t help it.”

“I know.”

Stiles wants to ask how much further they’ve got to go, but there’s a patch of darkness at the furthest end of the basement that’s getting bigger as they move. Does he really need more of an answer than that?

“You stuck this thing in the darkest, creepiest part of your dark, creepy basement, didn’t you?”

“I stuck it as far away from the way back up that I could,” Derek replies. Stiles glances over his shoulder at how far away from the elevator they are. He can’t even see it anymore, lost in the shadows between the lightbulbs.

“Okay,” he concedes. “I see your point.”

The patch of darkness is a neatly contained square by the time they get close. It’s a large, square opening into a section of the basement that’s separated off by a cement wall. The beams on either side and the cement over the opening are painted a garish red. Someone wrote the word ‘UTILITIES’ in black spray paint. The word was done freehand, and it crawls in an upward slant over the doorway. Rivulets of black trail from the bottoms of some of the letters.

Stiles pauses at the threshold, looking into the utility hallway. A bare bulb burns at either end, leaving shadows in the middle and in every pocket and crevice. He already knows what he’ll see when he looks to the right.

The massive antique mirror has been leaned against the wall, nestled between a deep stone utility sink and a longer trough sink with four rusted taps. There’s a white sheet hanging over it, only a scant couple of inches of gilded frame exposed at the bottom.

Stiles lets out his breath out, and the wheezy drag of it sounds like he’s been punched. His stomach churns just seeing limp sheet, knowing exactly what lay underneath it. Derek comes to stand at his back, and Stiles feels a hand cover his own. Derek slides their hands up, resting them over the lump in Stiles’ pocket.

Right. They have to move before they both lose their nerve.

Stiles frees his hand and sets his bat against the wall. He pulls out the bag he grabbed from the apartment, yanking the drawstring open. Derek positions himself beside the mirror while Stiles draws a circle on the floor with a handful of the ash. A small one. It just needs to be big enough for him, not big enough to impede Derek. And just far enough away that Mary will have to do a little more than reach out to grab him.

“Say when.”

Stiles breathes in deeply and steps into the circle, setting his bat against his shoulder. “When.”

Derek pulls the sheet free.

Stiles almost startles backwards. Mary is there, and she’s standing in front of his own reflection. She’s right at the cusp of the mirror as if it were a doorframe. She’s watching him. Like every other goddamn time, she keeps watching him.

The light overhead begins to flicker immediately. Mary lurches herself forward using those same jerky movements from before. Stiles hears the low growl behind him and catches Derek’s Beta blues in the reflection. He’s moved just behind Stiles, crouched low, all the power of a werewolf body low and coiled and ready to launch. He wants to move just as badly as Stiles does, judging by the slight quiver in his muscles.

A hand juts free of the mirror. There’s no sound of glass breaking. It doesn’t ripple or bend. It’s like the glass isn’t even there, though Stiles doesn’t dare step close enough to touch it and find out. Long, thin fingers grasp the lip of the frame as Mary lurches again on those legs that don’t work right. When she jerks the other side of body her forward, Stiles can see that several of her fingers point in directions they shouldn’t, and there’s a nasty bend to her forearm. The broken thing buckles as Mary begins to pull herself free of the mirror. It cracks and makes her slump to one side as she crawls over the gilded edge, and leaves black smears on the ornate swirls. It doesn’t seem to hurt her, though. Not in any way that hinders her.

The light sputters more violently. A dark curtain of hair swings heavily over her face as she staggers to brace her jerky movements as she pulls herself free of the frame. The last thing Stiles sees is Mary reaching for him with those bent, twisted fingers.

 

The light goes out.

 

Spots of white blink in front of Stiles’ eyes in the steady darkness. He can hear Derek’s shallow breath and a slight… clicking sound. Something brushes his shoulder. Starts out clumsy and then turns hot and painful.

Stiles swings his bat hard in the dark. His bat connects with something, makes a dull thumping noise. The sharpness digs into his shoulder deeper, the pain of something burying itself in muscle. Whatever he hit wasn’t good enough. Stiles rears back, brings his bat down directly in front of him with all the force he can. He hears the wet crack he wanted, and the digging in his shoulder stops abruptly. Derek snarls behind him, claws scraping on cement when he lunges. If they have any luck at all, Stiles hopes they got her out far enough that she can’t retreat back into the mirror.

Something heavy crashes into something that wasn’t as heavy right in front of him. There’s a scuffle. Sharp things click and scrape against the cement floor. Derek snarls in a way that makes Stiles itch inside his head and clench his fists to force himself not to leave the circle. The ash didn’t do a damn thing against Mary, but he can’t shove himself into the middle of a blind fight in the dark.

**Crack.**

It sounds like lots of little cracks that make one long sound. And then everything is still again. Quiet, save for labored breathing.

“Derek?” Stiles feels around blindly and feels a warm hand take his own. Strong, human fingers interlace with his.

“Yeah.”

Stiles kicks a line through the ash as he steps out of it and almost falls into Derek trying to get his arms around him. He can feel something sticky on him, and his own shoulder burns as he crushes Derek in a hug, but Stiles doesn’t care. They can deal with that later.

When the light above them finally begins to sputter back to life, the basement is empty aside from them. And so is the mirror. Stiles laughs, a sound that’s as shaky with tears as it is with joy as he gingerly touches the cool glass. It’s firm and solid and real and there’s only him and Derek in there. There are smears of the black goo on the floor, the glass, and even some on Stiles’ shirt where the fabric is red and sodden. In one spot, there’s a pool of it. That’s all that’s left.

Stiles slowly sits down on the cement floor, the adrenaline rushing out of him and taking most of his strength. Derek follows him down, and they lean against each other for support in the empty space.

 

* * *

 

[1 Missed Call from: Scott McCall]

 

Stiles keeps looking at that message on his phone screen. He doesn’t even want to unlock it. When he does, he’s going to have to do something to deal with that, and he’s just not ready yet.

“Are we bad pack members?” he asks. The early morning sunlight streaming into the loft and the solid yellow bulb of light over their heads in the bathroom makes it feel safe to talk like Mary isn’t going to come back. She’s not. He keeps checking his reflection in his phone just to make sure, and it’s just him. But now the deed is done, and it can’t be undone. And Scott… Stiles just wonders… will he be upset, even though the danger is gone, even though it worked? Just because it wasn’t what they were supposed to do?

“Yes,” Derek says, not looking up from his meticulous cleaning of the gouges in Stiles’ shoulder. They run askew, not like the four neat lines Mary once carved into his face.

Stiles cranes his neck back a little to look at Derek. “Really? Even though everything is okay now? And he doesn’t have to worry that his plan probably wouldn’t have worked?” Definitely wouldn’t have worked, if Stiles’ shoulder is any indication.

“Disobeying your Alpha makes you a bad pack member. So does going behind his back to do something else.”

It’s so matter-of-fact. One of those werewolf things that there’s just no wiggle room on. Stiles sighs and leans against Derek. “I guess we’re bad pack members today, then.” He hesitates. “Do you ever feel like maybe we’re… just not…”

“Yeah,” Derek says, not making him finish.

“Me too. Sometimes.”

Stiles looks at his phone again, feels relief at his lonely reflection. Hits the button to bring up the lock screen and feels dread at the missed call message. “We’re gonna have to tell him.”

Derek snips the end of a piece of tape and presses it down against Stiles’ clavicle. “Yeah, we will.” He slips the phone out of Stiles’ hand. “But it doesn’t have to be right now.”


End file.
